Índice de rotación de personal

scientific and factually sound. In the Ramsay household, Mr. Ramsay, a portrait of Leslie Stephen, stands for unbending, unmerciful law. Lily Briscoe will later find him "petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death" (TTL 40). He has no consideration for the world of imagination or make-believe, but instead praises pure and concrete reality, accepting all of its unpleasantness.

What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the

pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least

of all his own children.,. (TTL, 11-12)

In his mind, the truth should never be concealed as a means of softening the blows of life. Life is meant to

be vigorous and character-building. His children therefore "should be aware from childhood".

that life is difficult? facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the

power to endure. (TTL, 11)

This becomes Mr. Ramsay's creed, and he will expect those around him to adopt it with the same reverence that he does. Leslie Stephen is at once called to mind, being himself an advocate of the dictum: "dreams may be

pleasanter for the moment than realities; but happiness must be won by adapting our lives to the realities"

(Cited Bazin, 15). Mr. Ramsay esteems tangible reality, and revels in the disillusionment it causes. Mrs.

Ramsay, on the other hand, is eager to create hope; she creates the possibility of a fine day, despite the fact that it is venturing toward a possible untruth.

Similarly, when her daughter Cam is unable to sleep

because of a skull which James hangs in their room, Mrs. Ramsay is quick to alter a"disagreeable" situation by creating fantasy.

'Well then,' said Mrs. Ramsay, 'we will cover it up,' and they all watched her go to the chest of drawers, and open the little drawers ... she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the

skull, round and round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam's and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird's nest; it was a like beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes ... She could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cam's mind ... Mrs.

more rhythmically and more nonsensically, how she must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of mountains and valleys and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and gardens, and everything lovely until she sat upright and saw that Cam was asleep.

(TTL, 172-173) Mr. Ramsay holds that his wife's imaginative

distractions are untruths: "she flew in the face of

facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. 'Damn you,' he said" (TTL, 50).

Mr. Ramsay, in addition to his unyielding loyalty to actualized truth, is also dictated by precision and

exactitude. Without reservation, he brings to mind Quentin Bell's description of the Stephen men:

Their minds are formed to receive facts and when once they have a fact so clearly stated that they can take it in their hands, turn it this way and that, and scrutinise it, they are content.

(Bell i, 19) In his adherence to precision, however, Mr. Ramsay, like Peter Walsh and William Rodney, loses sight completely of the personal, emotional truth, the daily illuminations:

Indeed he seemed to her sometimes ... 'born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter's beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? ... And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at things. (TTL, 107-108)

Mr. Ramsay bases the success of his mind and his worth as a human being upon his ability to reach the letter Z. He wishes to be a leader, a revered success whom everyone will remember and esteem. He must, then, persevere to the end, to the letter Z. The following passage reveals the unresilient mechanics of his mind:

It was a spendid mind. For if thought is like the

keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reached Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the

geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and

somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the

window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q'there are a number of letters the last of which is

scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something ... He braced himself. He clenched

himself. {TTL, 53-54)

Obsessively goal- and success-oriented, and at all costs', the attainment of Z becomes of paramount importance to Mr. Ramsay. The protection of his son and wife is simply another assertion of his masculine ego; he protects them out of duty and a desire to be needed, not out of love. His life, "narrow as the blade" (TTL, 10), revolves around calculations and introspection, around his

"exactingness and egotism" (TTL, 58). His success is contingent upon "the magnificence of his head" (TTL, 58) and his victorious arrival at Z. "Mr. Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn" (TTL, 56).

As earlier discussed with respect to Leslie Stephen, the masculine ego and worth is contingent upon the

sympathy and bolstering which they demand from women. s;

Mr. Ramsay is undoubtedly formed in the Stephen mould. There he stood, demanding sympathy.

Mrs. Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself ... and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of

life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged

itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr. Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a

failure. (TTL, 58-59)

His constant crying out for affirmation from women becomes a sharp intrusion into the privacy of their world. In his overbearing demands for comfort and for the confirmation of his excellence, he exhausts the

generosity of his wife. He becomes childish and needy in his pursuit of assurance.

It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life ... Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said, at last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he would

take a turn ... (TTL, 59-60)

It becomes the woman’s role to provide his life source, unreservedly. She becomes mother, provider, protector, redeemer.

Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all

aglow; bade him take his ease there, go in and out, enjoy himself .,. James felt all her strength

flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy. (TTL, 59) Mr. Ramsay ceases to exist without his wife's

constant confirmation of his genius and his worth. "If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him"

(TTL, 60). He becomes paralyzed and ineffective in his effort. Mrs. Ramsay will continue to give lavishly of herself, to the demanding, arid principle. Mrs. Ramsay,

like Julia Stephen, like Helen Ambrose, will give away her innermost, creative, affirming core to the demands of her husband and society.

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James ... felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding

sympathy. (TTL, 60)

Mr. Ramsay will turn to Lily Briscoe,after Mrs. Ramsay's death, for the same validation, calling to mind Leslie's dependence upon his daughter Stella after Julia's death. Lily, however, formed in a different mould from Mrs. Ramsay's, will not concede to the same lavishing. Lily quakes at the thought of nourishing a wounded ego that should in reality be nourishing itself.

Instantly, with the force of some primeval gust (for really he could not restrain himself any longer).

there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have done something,

said something — all except myself, thought Lily girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up old maid,

presumably.

Mr. Ramsay sighed to the full. He waited. Was she not going to say anything? Did she not see what he wanted from her?... All Lily wished was that this enormous flood of grief, this insatiable hunger for sympathy, this demand that she should surrender herself up to him entirely ... should leave her, should be diverted ... before it swept her in its

flow. (TTL, 226)

Lily, "not a woman", not a Mrs. Ramsay, finds it

dishonest to fulfil his needs, it "was immensely to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb" (TTL, 228). In the end, both will triumph: Lily belittles his needs by exclaiming, "'What beautiful boots 1'" and then.

She was ashamed of herself. To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul; when he had shown her his bleeding hands, his lacerated heart, and asked her to pity them, then to say, cheerfully,

'Ah, but what beautiful boots you wear I' deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it, in one of his sudden roars of ill-temper, complete

annihilation. (TTL, 229)

But Mr. Ramsay, instead, will be flattered by the compliment and attention. His self-worth is raised tenfold because Lily Briscoe approves of his boots.

"Instead, Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him" (TTL, 229).

Mr. Ramsay will feel threatened and excluded by Mrs. Ramsay's moments of solitude and vision, for they

conflict with her role as wife and comforter. Therefore, in retaliation, Mr. Ramsay will build up his own genius

and ego while deflating hers. His magnificence and genius is confirmed only through the belittling of hers.

And he wondered what she was reading, and

exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book- learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was

astonishingly beautiful. (TTL, 182)

Charles Tansley, a guest at the Ramsays' house, and

certainly made in the Stephen mould, will similarly feel threatened by the independence and outspokenness of some of the women at the dinner party. Once again, in

reaction, he will deprecate their intelligence and their femininity.

For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these people wanted him to talk. He was not going to be condescended to by these silly women. He had been reading in his room, and now he came down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy. Why did they dress? He had come down in his ordinary

clothes .,. They made men say that sort of thing ... They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women's fault. Women made

civilisation impossible with all their 'charm', all their silliness. (TTL, 129)

So while such men as Tansley and Ramsay feel they must talk down to women for their silliness and

superficiality, they similarly feel threatened by any sign of women's growing independence, need for solitude, and mental integrity. Women, it seems, should be seen and not heard; but then even that is not enough.

Mrs. Ramsay is one of Woolf's most complex female characters. At times, she resembles Mrs, Dalloway; however, Mrs. Dalloway is given the gift of freedom and

selfhood, while Mrs. Ramsay's "treasure" is stolen from her. She is Virginia Woolf's evocative earth-mother;

she is wholly maternal, fecund, dutiful,

self-sacrificing, submissive. But she is also at times a

unifier, she is intuitive, creative, healing. But Mrs. Ramsay's vision of life, significantly, will cease to be expressed. Trapped within her feminine boundaries, any yearnings for completion and deliverance that she may possess are severed by the "beak of brass" (TTL, 58). Ultimately, however, her aspiring vision will be completely and at once expressed by Lily Briscoe.

Herbert Marder radically errs when he asserts that "Mrs. Ramsay as wife, mother, hostess, is the androgynous artist in life, creating with the harmony of her being. Compared to the harmony she has created, both Mr.

Ramsay's treatises and Lily Briscoe's painting seem paltry things" (Marder, 128). Marder overlooks the

severity with which Mrs. Ramsay is confined by her role. She cannot be ultimately creative, for she fails to live from both sides of her being. Mrs. Ramsay is purely feminine. She is unifying, she can assert harmony; but she is still one-sided. Her ultimate magnificence will only be expressed through Lily Briscoe's rounded vision. Carolyn Heilbrun in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny agrees that

It is only in groping our way through the clouds of sentiment and misplaced biographical information that we are able to discover Mrs. Ramsay, far from androgynous and complete, to be as one-sided and

life-denying as her husband. (Heilbrun, 155)

Mrs. Ramsay is described by Hermione Lee as being "beautiful, queenly, short-sighted, philanthropic and inventive. Her intimacy with her children nourishes her tendency towards fantasy and exaggeration. She is

associated with poetry, Mr. Ramsay with prose" (Lee,

118). Mrs. Ramsay i£ an ordering force in the novel. As she knits or entertains, she creates an intricate pattern out of the unconnected fragments surrounding her: the sounds of people talking, the children playing, Charles Tansley's books scattering overhead, Mr. Ramsay's

"phrase-making" (TTL, 104); she delicately builds a frame in which she will weave a design. Mrs. Ramsay's creativity, however, is lacking and at times broken, for it is ridden with duties and obligations; it ceases to be pure and accomplished, for it remains rooted to the domestic. Lily recalls that Mrs. Ramsay had

brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful) something— this scene on the beach, for example, this moment of friendship and liking

...almost like a work of art. (TTL, 239-240)

Mrs. Ramsay at times resembles the artist, but her "work of art" is never finalised or expressed because of her ultimate imprisonment and single-mindedness. Her many moments of illumination and harmony would, if it were not

away in an attic to collect dust. Lily Briscoe frees and makes Mrs. Ramsay permanent, for Lily is the artist. In her passionate reverence for the maternal and her role as wife and comforter, Mrs. Ramsay will fail to actualize her larger and freer potential. She is locked into the feminine state of mind, despite her intuitive yearning for something more collective.

But some of these states of mind seem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others. In order to keep oneself continuing in them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually the repression becomes an effort.

(AROOO, 146-147)